The judge connects the dots. The evidence that Gen. David Petraeus, formerly the commander of U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the author of the current Army field manual, Princeton Ph.D. and, until last week, the director of the Central Intelligence Agency, was forced to resign from the CIA to silence him is far stronger than is the version of ... MORE
Doing justice, not merely law enforcement. As reported earlier, a NH jury has found a man not guilty of growing cannabis in the first-ever (that I know of) use of jury nullification in NH! Now one of the jurors, who happens to be a Free State Project participant, Cathleen, is speaking out. Below is her written statement about her experience on the ... MORE
Economic illiteracy is a problem. "People do not love markets,” says Pascal Boyer of the International Cognition & Culture Institute, “there is a lot of evidence for that.” Sadly, Boyer is right and I suspect he’s right about the cause too: People do not like markets because people seem not to understand much about market economics. We don’t fully ... MORE
Empirical evidence has great value. It has long seemed to me that there is far more rationality in sports, and in commentaries on sports, than there is in politics and in commentaries on politics. What has puzzled me is why this is so, when what happens in politics has far more serious effects on people's lives. To take one common example, there are many people ... MORE
Police utilize pooch that alerts for drugs in every car. A dog with a sharp nose for drugs can be a great asset to any police department, but in the case of a German shepherd named Bono, accuracy is not his strongest suit. The four-legged crime fighter working for the Virginia State Police has been on a hot streak, detecting drugs nearly every time he’s on the ... MORE
Does unequal income cause economic ills? There must be something in the water in Scandinavia: Nobel laureates, from our president to Paul Krugman and Joseph Stiglitz, all agree that high levels of inequality are a serious problem, if not the problem, facing our weak economy. According to this liberal thesis, either the 2008 financial ... MORE
Let's require evidence, not just belief. Is there any issue more dependent on widespread lapses in critical thinking than the idea of man-caused global warming? Nothing wrecks an argument faster than a question revealing a gaping hole in that argument's fundamental premise. Notice the abundantly obvious derailment in this example: "We ... MORE
"A prosecutor ... may receive absolute immunity from suit for acts violating the Constitution in order to advance important societal values." -Elena Kagan, Solicitor General, 2009 After the Civil War, Congress passed several civil rights laws, including one allowing anyone whose said rights had been violated to sue those ... MORE
There is a little black box spy hiding in your vehicle. When you are car shopping, how many times has a salesman pitched the 15 to 30 specific data elements constantly being collected by the car's black box as you drive? Probably never, but there's electronic data everywhere and that includes your car collecting digital evidence which might turn into the star witness ... MORE
A blind disregard for the evidence. Critics of Florida's self-defense law object to its recognition of a right to "stand your ground" in public places, which eliminated the duty to retreat from an assailant. Yet many of these critics seem to believe they have a duty to stand their ground and never retreat, using George Zimmerman's shooting of Trayvon ... MORE